The Steel Remains lffh-1 Read online

  His eyes snapped up to the three steppe ghouls in the gloom ahead of him. He lifted his lance in one trembling hand and threw back his head and howled, howled as if it might crack the sky, might reach Runi’s soul on its path along the Sky Road, sunder the band he walked on, and tumble him back to earth again.

  Time ceased. Now there was only death.

  He barely heard the hiss of Klarn’s first arrow past his flank as he stormed toward the remaining runners, still howling.

  CHAPTER 3

  The window shattered with a clear, high tinkling and whatever had come through it thumped hard on the threadbare carpet in the center of the room.

  Ringil shifted in the disarray of bed linen and forced one eye open. The edges of the broken glass glinted down at him in sunlight far too bright to look at directly in his present condition. He rolled over on his back, one arm pawing about on the bed for his companion of the night before. His hand encountered only an expanse of patchily damp sheet. The boy was gone, as they usually were well before the sun came up. His mouth tasted like the inside of a dueling gauntlet and his head, it dawned on him slowly, was thumping like a Majak war drum.

  Padrow’s Day. Hurrah.

  He rolled back over and groped around on the floor beside the bed until his fingers brushed a heavy, irregularly shaped object. Further exploration proved it to be a stone, wrapped in what felt like expensive parchment. He dredged it up to his face, confirmed what his fingers had told him, and unraveled the paper. It was a carelessly torn piece of a larger sheet, scented and scrawled with words in Trelayne script.

  Get Up.

  The writing was familiar.

  Ringil groaned and sat up amid the sheets. Wrapping himself in one of them, he clambered off the bed and stumbled to the newly broken window. Down in the snow-sprinkled courtyard, men sat on horses, all dressed in steel cuirasses and helmets that winked mercilessly in the sun. A carriage stood in their midst, curved lines in the snow marking where it had turned to a halt. A woman in fur-lined hood and Trelayne robes of rank stood by the carriage, shading her eyes as she looked up.

  “Good afternoon, Ringil,” she called.

  “Mother.” Ringil suppressed another groan. “What do you want?”

  “Well, I’d say breakfast, but the hour is long gone. Did you enjoy your Padrow’s Eve?”

  Ringil put a hand to one side of his head where the throbbing seemed to be worse. The mention of breakfast had thrown an unexpected flip into his stomach.

  “Look, just stay there,” he said faintly. “I’ll be down in a moment. And don’t throw any more stones. I’ll have to pay for that.”

  Back inside the room, he sank his head into the bowl of water beside the bed, rubbed his hair and face with it, scrubbed the inside of his mouth with a scented dental twig from the jar on the table, and went about locating his discarded clothes. It took longer than you would have expected for a room that small.

  When he was dressed, he raked his long fine black hair back from his face, bound it with a piece of dour gray cloth, and let himself out onto the landing of the inn. The other doors were all securely closed; there was no one about. Most of his fellow guests were doing the civilized thing and sleeping off the Padrow’s Day festivities. He clattered down the stairs, still tucking his shirt into his breeches, quick before the Lady Ishil of Eskiath Fields got bored and ordered her guard to start breaking down the inn’s front door.

  Slipping the bolt on the courtyard entrance, he stepped outside and stood blinking in the sunlight. The mounted guard didn’t seem to have moved at all since he left the window, but Ishil was already at the door. As soon as he appeared, she put down her hood and draped her arms around him. The kiss she placed on his cheek was courtly and formal, but there was a tighter need in the way she hugged him. He reciprocated with as much enthusiasm as his pounding head and queasy stomach could manage. As soon as she got that from him, she stepped back from the embrace, held him at arm’s length like a gown she thought she might put on.

  “Well met, my beautiful son, well met.”

  “How did you know which window to break?” he countered sourly.

  The Lady Ishil gestured. “Oh, we asked. It wasn’t difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep.” A delicately curled lip. She let him go. “And who with.”

  Ringil ignored that one. “I’m a hero, Mother. What do you expect?”

  “Yes, are they still calling you Angeleyes in these parts?” Peering into his face. “I think Demoneyes suits you better today. There’s more red in there than the crater at An-Monal.”

  “It’s Padrow’s Day,” he said shortly. “Eyes this color are traditional. And anyway, since when did you know what An-Monal looks like? You’ve never been there.”

  She snorted. “How would you know that? I could have been there anytime in the last three years, which is how long it’s been since you last chose to visit your poor aged mother.”

  “Mother, please.” He shook his head and looked at her. Aged was, he supposed, an accurate enough statement of his mother’s forty-something years, but it hardly showed. Ishil had been a bride at thirteen, a mother of four before she was twenty. She’d had the following two and a half decades to work on her feminine charms and ensure that whatever Gingren Eskiath’s indiscretions with the other, younger females who came within his grabbing radius, he would always come back to the marriage bed in the end. She wore kohl in the Yhelteth style, on eyes and to etch her lips; her hair was bound back from a delicate, barely lined forehead and cheekbones that screamed her family’s southern ancestry. And when she moved, her robes caught on curves more appropriate to a woman half her age. In Trelayne high society, it was whispered that this was sorcery, that Ishil had sold her soul for her youthful aspect. Ringil, who’d watched her dress enough times, thought it more likely cosmetics, though on the soul selling he had to agree. Ishil’s aspirational merchant-class parents might have secured for their daughter a lifetime of luxury by marrying her into the house of Eskiath, but like all commerce it came at a price, and that price was life with Gingren.

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she insisted. “When were you last in Trelayne?”

  “How is Father?” he asked obliquely.

  Their eyes met. She sighed and shrugged. “Oh, you know. Your father’s . . . your father. No easier to live with now he’s gray. He asks after you.”

  Ringil arched an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “No, really. Sometimes, when he’s tired in the evenings. I think maybe he’s beginning to . . . regret. Some of the things he said, anyway.”

  “Is he dying, then?” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “Is that why you’re here?”

  She looked at him again, and this time he thought he saw the momentary brilliance of tear sheen in her eyes. “No, that’s not why I’m here. I wouldn’t have come for that, and you know it. It’s something else.” She clapped her hands suddenly, pasted on a smile. “But what are we doing out here, Ringil? Where is everyone? This place has about as much life to it as an Aldrain stone circle. I have hungry men and maids, horses that need feeding and watering. I could do with a little food myself, come to that. Doesn’t your landlord want to earn himself some League coin?”

  Ringil shrugged. “I’ll go and ask him. Then maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”

  THE LANDLORD, BY HIS FACE AS HUNGOVER AS RINGIL, DID BRIGHTEN somewhat at the mention of Trelayne currency. He opened the dining chamber at the back of the residents’ bar, ordered bleary-eyed stable hands to take care of the horses, and wandered off into the kitchen to see what was salvageable from the previous night’s feast. Ringil went with him, made himself an herbal infusion, and carried it back to one of the dining chamber’s oak trestle tables, where he slumped and stared at the steam rising from the cup as if it were a summoned sprite. In due course Ishil came in, followed by her men and three ladies-in-waiting who’d presumably been hiding in the carriage. They bustled about, making far too muc
h noise.

  “Traveling light, I see.”

  “Oh, Ringil, be quiet.” Ishil settled herself on the other side of the table. “It’s not my fault you drank too much last night.”

  “No, but it’s your fault I’m awake this early dealing with it.” One of the ladies-in-waiting tittered, then flushed into silence as Ishil cut her an icy glance. Ringil sipped at his tea and grimaced. “So you want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Could we not have some coffee first?”

  “It’s coming. I don’t have a lot of small talk, Mother.”

  Ishil made an elegant gesture of resignation. “Oh, very well. Do you remember your cousin Sherin?”

  “Vaguely.” He fitted a childhood face to the name, a wan little girl with downward-falling sheaves of dark hair, too young for him to want to play with in the gardens. He associated her with summers at Ishil’s villa down the coast at Lanatray. “One of Nerla’s kids?”

  “Dersin’s. Nerla was her paternal aunt.”

  “Right.”

  The silence pooled. Someone came in and started building a fire in the hearth.

  “Sherin has been sold,” Ishil said quietly.

  Ringil looked at the cup in his hand. “Really. How did that happen?”

  “How does it always happen these days?” Ishil shrugged. “Debt. She married, oh, some finished-goods merchant, you don’t know him. Name of Bilgrest. This was a few years ago. I sent you an invitation to the wedding, but you never replied. Anyway, it seems this Bilgrest had a gambling problem. He’d been speculating on the crop markets for a while, too, and getting it mostly wrong. That, plus maintaining appearances in Trelayne, wiped out the bulk of his accumulated capital, and then like the idiot he was, he stopped paying into the sureties fund to cut costs, and then a ship carrying his merchandise got wrecked off the Gergis cape, and then, well.” Another shrug. “You know how it goes after that.”

  “I can imagine. But Dersin’s got money. Why didn’t she bail them out?”

  “She doesn’t have much money, Ringil. You always assume—”

  “We’re talking about her fucking daughter, for Hoiran’s sake. And Garat’s got well-heeled friends, hasn’t he? They could have raised the finance somehow. Come to that, why didn’t they just buy Sherin back?”

  “They didn’t know. Bilgrest wouldn’t tell anybody the way things were going, and Sherin went along with the charade. She was always so proud, and she knows Garat never really approved of the marriage. Apparently, he’d already loaned them money a couple of times and never got it back. I think Garat and Bilgrest had words. After that, Sherin just stopped asking. Stopped visiting. Dersin hadn’t seen either of them for months. We were both down at Lanatray when we heard, and by the time the news got to us and we got back to the city—it must have been at least a week by then. We had to break into the house.” She shuddered delicately. “It was like walking into a tomb. All the furniture gone, the bailiffs took everything, even the drapes and carpets, and Bilgrest just sat there with the shutters closed, muttering to himself in the dark.”

  “Didn’t they have any kids?”

  “No, Sherin couldn’t. I think that’s why she clung to Bilgrest so hard, because he didn’t seem to care about it.”

  “Oh great. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Another little pool of quiet. The coffee came, with yesterday’s bread toasted to cover its stiffness, an assortment of jams and oils and some reheated broth. The men-at-arms and the ladies-in-waiting fell on it all with an enthusiasm that made Ringil slightly queasy all over again. Ishil took a little coffee and looked somberly back at her son.

  “I told Dersin you’d look for her,” she said.

  Ringil raised an eyebrow. “Did you? That was rash.”

  “Please don’t be like this, Gil. You’d be paid.”

  “I don’t need the money.” Ringil closed his eyes briefly. “Why can’t Father do it? It’s not like he doesn’t have the manpower.”

  Ishil looked away. “You know your father’s opinion of my family. And Dersin’s side are practically full-blood marsh dwellers if you go back a couple of generations. Hardly worthy of his favors. Anyway, Gingren won’t go against the edicts. You know how things are since the war. It’s legal. Sherin was sold legally.”

  “You could still appeal it. There’s provision in the charter. Get Bilgrest to go on his knees to the Chancellery, offer public apology and restitution, you act as guarantor if Dersin can’t come up with the cash and Father doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.”

  “Don’t you think we tried that?”

  “So what happened?”

  Sudden, imperious flare of anger, a side of Ishil he’d nearly forgotten. “What happened, Ringil, is that Bilgrest hanged himself rather than apologize. That’s what happened.”

  “Ooops.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “No, I suppose not.” He swallowed some more tea. “Very noble, though. Death before dishonor and all that. And from a finished-goods merchant, too. Remarkable. Father must have been impressed despite himself.”

  “This is not about you and your father, Ringil.”

  The ladies-in-waiting froze. Ishil’s shout bounced off the low roof of the dining chamber, brought curious faces gawping at the doorway to the kitchen and the window out into the yard. The men-at-arms exchanged glances, wondering almost visibly if they were expected to throw some weight around and drive these peasants back to minding their own business. Ringil caught the eye of one of them, shook his head slightly. Ishil compressed her lips, drew a long deep breath.

  “This doesn’t concern your father,” she said quietly. “I know better than to rely on him. It’s a favor I’m asking of you.”

  “My days of fighting for the cause of justice, truth, and light are done, Mother.”

  She drew herself up on her seat. “I’m not interested in justice or truth. This is family.”

  Ringil closed his eyes again, massaged them with finger and thumb at the bridge of his nose. “Why me?”

  “Because you know these people, Gil.” She reached across the table and touched his free hand with the back of hers. His eyes jerked open at the contact. “You used to rub our faces in the fact enough when you lived at home. You can go places in Trelayne that I can’t, that your father won’t go. You can—”

  She bit her lip.

  “Break the edicts,” he finished for her drearily.

  “I promised Dersin.”

  “Mother.” Abruptly, something seemed to dislodge a chunk of his hangover. Anger and a tight sense of the unfairness of it all came welling up and fed him an obscure strength. “Do you know what you’re asking me to do? You know what the profit margins are on slaving. Have you got any idea what kind of incentives that generates, what kind of behavior? These people don’t fuck about, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t fucking know. You said yourself, it’s weeks since this went down. If Sherin’s certifiably barren—and these people have warlocks who can find that out in pretty short order—then she’s a sure shot for the professional concubine end of the market, which means she’s probably already been shipped out of Trelayne to a Parashal training stable. It could take me weeks to find out where that is, and by then she’ll more than likely be on her way to the auction block again, anywhere in the League or maybe even south to the Empire. I’m not a one-man army.”

  “At Gallows Gap, they say you were.”

  “Oh, please.”

  He stared morosely into the depths of his tea. You know these people, Ringil. With less of a headache, he might have laughed. Yes, he knew these people. He’d known them when slavery was still technically illegal in the city-states and they made an easier living from other illicit trades. In fact, known didn’t really cut it—like a lot of Trelayne’s moneyed youth, he’d been an avid customer of these people. Proscribed substances, prohibited sexual practices, the things that would always generate a market with ludicrous
profit margins and shadowy social leverage. Oh, he knew these people. Slab Findrich, for example, the drilled-hole eyes and the spit he always left on the pipes they shared. Grace-of-Heaven Milacar, murdering turncoat minions with excessive chemical kindness—seen through the neurasthenic fog of a flandrijn hit, it hadn’t seemed so bad, had in fact quite appealed to a louche adolescent irony Ringil was cultivating at the time. Poppy Snarl, harsh painted beauty and weary, look-you-can’t-seriously-expect-me-to-put-up-with-this counterfeit patience before she inflicted one of the brutal punishments for which she was famed, and which invariably crippled for life. He’d gone down on her once, Hoiran alone knew why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and he went home after with the unaccustomed scent of woman on his mouth and fingers, and a satisfyingly complete sense of self-soiling. Snarl and Findrich had both dabbled in the slave trade even when it was frowned upon, and both had rhapsodized about what could be achieved in that sector if the lawmakers would just loosen up a little and open the debt market once and for all.

  By now they’d be up to their eyes in it.

  Suddenly he was wondering how Grace-of-Heaven looked these days. If he still had the goatee, if he’d shaved his skull ahead of incipient baldness, the way he always said he would.

  Uh-oh.

  With a mother’s eye, Ishil saw the moment pivot in him. Perhaps she knew it before he did himself. Something changed in her face, a barely perceptible softening of the kohl-defined features, like an artist’s thumb rubbing along sketch lines he’d drawn too harshly. Ringil glanced up and caught it happening. He rolled his eyes, made a long-suffering face. Ishil’s lips parted.

  “No, don’t.” He held up an advisory hand. “Just. Don’t.”

  His mother said nothing, but she smiled.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG TO PACK. HE WENT UP TO HIS ROOM, TORE through it like an irritable whirlwind, and flung a dozen items into a knapsack. Mostly, it was books.

  Back down in the residents’ bar, he retrieved the Ravensfriend and the Kiriath scabbard from their place above the fireplace. By now there were people about, tavern staff and guests both, and the ones who knew him gaped as he took the sword down. The scabbard felt strange as he hefted it; it was the first occasion in a long time that he’d unpinned it from the mountings. He’d forgotten how light it was. He pulled about a handbreadth of blade free, held it up to the light, and squinted along the edge for a moment before he realized there was no real purpose to the action and he was just posturing. His mood shifted minutely. A tiny smile leaked from the corner of his mouth, and with it came a gathering sense of motion he hadn’t expected to feel.